Fresh Fitness: In Brownie And In Health

Brownie Basics

With so little money being spent at the moment, I feel it’s quite acceptable to treat myself to a takeaway or two at the weekend after a hard week of work. Unfortunately, this Friday most of my desired options were missing! However, I took the opportunity to try something new.

Brownie Backstory

Fresh Fitness, huh. No, the takeaway options were not great. I’m not automatically opposed to ‘fitness food’ though, and was seduced by the low calorie counts! I’m still trying to ‘diet’ to whatever extent that’s mentally feasible in the time of coronavirus.

So I ordered a whole bunch of foods and looked forward to filling my belly with healthy versions of all the stuff. And they were a mixed bag if we’re honest. There was a large dish of chicken with cauliflower rice and broccoli; I’ve enjoyed cauliflower rice in the past but it…didn’t taste good in this dish. I ended up not really finishing it. There was a pot of smoked chicken with what seemed to be like a truffle paste and… celeriac? This was alright. There was a slice of carrot cake: I know, the hedonism of double dessert, but the carrot cake was pretty good, nicely dense and satisfying. Perhaps carrot cake lends itself to being a healthy dessert. I mean, it’s carrot! Carrot is good for you. And what do you add to carrot cake to make it more exciting? Dried fruit!

My main complaint about the Fresh Fitness food – and maybe this is kind of my fault for expectations – is that is all the food came cold, with instructions for heating up the big chicken dish. Let’s not get into “is restaurant food worth the price” because obviously that’s a very subjective question, but honestly for the same price as any other Deliveroo restaurant I did expect… hot food. And I didn’t get it, not without a quick blast of the microwave on the chicken dish, which probably didn’t massively help the flavours and textures.

But anyway, eventually I was through my generally disappointing dinner and ready for the brownie, and I have to be honest about my frame of mind here. I was really rooting for this brownie. It was billed on the menu as a ‘cauliflower brownie’, and while of course that means cauliflower flour or something rather than a standard brownie with lumps of cauliflower in it, but it’s still an exciting and unexpected combination of words. And it looked a lot better than the dry lump of vaguely baked cake I was semi-expecting (I had something like this in my head). But I was still concerned, because in general desserts are not meant to be healthy, and attempts to make them healthy often fall flat and make something that fails to work as a dessert, really. Exhibit A.

Let’s find out what we’ve got here. I considered microwaving it, but decided to eat it cold on the grounds that it arrived cold with no instructions to heat it up, so if it’s meant to be eaten hot to make it good… that’s on Fresh Fitness!

Brownie Points

Taste: I wish I could say otherwise, but it’s not good. Fundamentally: I can’t really get any taste of chocolate out of this, and it doesn’t taste at all sweet. It tastes as if…the sugar that should go into a brownie was replaced with some substitute, and someone was adamant that it was just like sugar, better even, and… it’s not. It wasn’t outright offensive, but yeah, it was disappointing. 3/10

Texture: The texture – when divorced from the taste – is not so bad. It’s good! It’s moist, thick, satisfying to put in my mouth, covered in a thick layer of (let’s assume) chocolate. In fact, I’d be very inclined to give it a high score, except for one thing… peppered through the brownie were, let’s say, pieces of husk. No other way to describe it really! “Husk” is what it felt like, like when you roast beans and a little bit of the overcooked skin is left in the mush. It soured the experience, sadly. 6/10

Presentation: It looks… so very good. Look at the wave of chocolate on top, look at the brownie, look at that layer of whatever it even is between the two of them. I like how this looks, I wish it tasted better. 4/5

Value: £4 for quite a lot of brownie, but not very good brownie. Cheaper than I’d expect a hot restaurant brownie. A bit on the pricey side for a cold café brownie. Even though I didn’t particularly like it, I think it’s on the better side of value, for 6/10

Fudge Factor: I got complaints about Fresh Fitness, and the way the meal surrounding this brownie arrived, and I could nitpick more things (like, the general lack of taste makes it frustratingly impossible to work out what that mid-top layer is). But, it’ll scrape a point of fudge factor, cos you know what… I get to put the words “Cauliflower Brownie” on my leaderboard, and I like that. 1/5

Fresh Total: 20

Should I Buy And Eat This Brownie?

This has come right down in the midpoint of my scoring system (I mean, in theory I suppose scores could run below 0 or above 40, because I have total control over the numbers I assign, but let’s ignore that). So should you buy and eat it? Well… on balance, I’d say no. Look, it’s not the worst brownie (obviously). I have possibly even recommended worse brownies before. But it’s not a good brownie, it sort of scrapes into okay-ness on slightly generous Value and Texture scores (I could have decided that the husk pieces ruined it, or that it wasn’t a good enough brownie to be good value) and if you were going to get a dessert from Fresh Fitness I would have to insist you get the carrot cake, which I genuinely liked.

Closing Thoughts

So how’s everyone else’s quarantine going? I’ve been rewatching Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee on Netflix, and I can’t quite put my finger on what it is about this show but it just makes me want to go “fuck it”, abandon my current life and go do something completely crazy somewhere else.